Professor of Urban History

Contact Details

Biography

I came to Leicester as Professor of Urban History in 2006 after many years at Leeds Met, where I was Reader in History. My interest in cities like Manchester and Liverpool go back to my postgraduate days spent trying to work out the complex relationship between merchants and manufacturers and the places they lived in. As well as publishing books and articles I also worked with television as historical advisor to the six-part BBC2 series 'Middle Classes', first broadcast in 2001. Now I am increasingly taken up by the history of the mundane or everyday. Just as ordinary things have histories, from drains to power stations, so I like the idea that historical production can take many forms - vodcasts, exhibitions and soundscapes are just some of the possible ways we can transmit the past. 

Research

• Research Interests 
• Publications

PhD Supervision

Modern urban history, with special reference to the culture and environment of English industrial cities since 1800; the middle class; history, theory and methodology. 

I currently supervise five PhD students

• Tom Hulme (ESRC funded), ‘Citizenship and civic culture in Manchester and Chicago between the wars’
• Gary Davies (University of Leicester bursary), ‘H.J. Dyos and the origins of urban history in Britain’
• Stephen Murray (PT), ‘Electricity, planning and power: Bankside power station, London, c.1940-1980’
• Richard Harrison (ESRC funded), ‘Traffic planning and Construction in Leicester and Milton Keynes, c.1960-1975'
• Matthew Parker (Leverhulme funded), 'Making the city mobile: The place of the car in planning postwar Birmingham'

Teaching

Undergraduate 

HS2240 Society and Spaces (with Dr Rebecca Madgin and Dr Richard Jones)
HS3665, Brave New World? City, Culture and Identity in Post-War England
HS3673, The Transformation of Leicester, 1945-1980 (with Colin Hyde of the East Midlands Oral History Archive).

Postgraduate

I teach courses on urban historiography, conservation and planning, research methods, and social theory.

Administrative Responsibilities

• Director of the Centre for Urban History
• Member of the School Management Committee  

Most Recent Publications

1. Gunn, S. and Vernon J. (eds.) The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain, Berkeley: University of California Press (2011)
2. Gunn, S. ,‘The Buchanan report, environment and the problem of traffic in 1960s Britain’, Twentieth-Century British History (electronic publication, Jan 2011)
3. ‘Between modernism and conservation: Konrad Smigielski and the planning of postwar Leicester’ in Rodger, R. ed., A History of Modern Leicester Lancaster: Carnegie Press (forthcoming 2011)
4. Gunn, S., ‘The rise and fall of British urban modernism: planning Bradford 1945-1970’, Journal of British Studies, 48:3 (October, 2010), pp.849-869